Well, all the backups in the world will not help if your main server crashes. I have just spent the better part of a week and a half dealing with this issue. I now have alopecia totalis. After the long Christmas holiday I came into a server which would not boot up. The dreaded yellow flashing light. I managed to get it up and running only to have it go down again about 5 minutes alter. I got online and did some research on Dell server tech sites. I ran out and replaced the internal battery and the server came up for about an hour. I managed to get a week of schedules printed off before it went down again.
I finally called "the guy". On the advice of the tech sites and Dell support, we replaced the power supply, no go, replaced the motherboard, no go, replaced the processor, no go (and mind you none of these parts were readily available as Dell uses only their own proprietary junk and they had to be ordered and shipped).
My hard drives are RAID controlled and hot swaps so I was pretty sure my data was there. I also had a tape back up, an external hard drive back up, a back up to an old server (running SB 2000) and off site back up to Mozy Pro (which by the way I am canceling as it was very difficult trying to get to it).
After everything else failed (including Dell support which sucked), "the guy" found the very same server on Craig's list in a town 90 minutes away. He drove up there and bought it for $350, switched out the hard drives and voila!
Not having a working EMR was bad enough (and I actually could have restored the AC back ups to my desktop) but my PM program needed the full SQL server (which I was only backing up to the tape drive)so I could not bill a dime for almost 2 weeks.
So, Bert, I have learned a great deal from this. I am now backing up the entire server to an external hard drive. Yes, it takes a long time but I never want to go through this again.
